Shayne Looper: Bible stories some people find embarrassing

Some stories just shouldn’t be in the Bible, at least according to contemporary scholarship. They are embarrassing.

Shayne Looper

Some stories just shouldn’t be in the Bible, at least according to contemporary scholarship. They are embarrassing.

It’s not that they are too bloody or risque. The problem is that they present a Jesus who just shouldn’t be there — a Jesus who doesn’t fit the mold modern scholars expect him to fill.

The presupposition underlying much modern scholarship is that the Gospels are not historical records but theological and apologetic documents that evolved over decades, constructed from stories the early church told to assure believers and fend off critics.

According to this view, the assorted stories compiled in the Gospels are largely fictitious. They present a divine Jesus (as opposed to the real, historical Jesus), one strong enough to warrant the Church’s confidence — a Jesus who can heal, conquer evil powers, feed thousands with a few loaves of bread and overcome death itself.

But then there are those troubling stories — the ones that shouldn’t be there, that slipped in under the wary editor’s nose, and appear throughout the New Testament.

One such story is found in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Mark. The narrative follows Jesus into the familiar village of Bethsaida, where he encounters a blind man. Jesus takes the man by the hand and leads him away from curious onlookers.

He then puts his hands on the man in an act of healing, and asks if he sees anything. The man replies: “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Jesus then repeats the process and the man is healed.

This is just the kind of story one should not find in the Gospel if, as some scholars insist, the writer reworked his material to present a divine Jesus. Any story that could be used to imply a failure on Jesus’ part to heal the first time around would never have seen the light of day.

Another story that gives one pause comes from the Easter narrative in Matthew. We are told that the chief priests devised a plan to cover up the resurrection by paying Roman guards to say that “His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.”

The modern scholar smiles knowingly: He has caught the evangelist red-handed, concocting a story to hide the fact that the “historical” Jesus was not resurrected. But, as historian and New Testament scholar N. T. Wright has concluded, the presence of this story in the Gospel has exactly the opposite effect.

The influential scholar Rudolph Bultmann suggested that the account of the empty tomb was itself a fiction. He claimed that the anti-Christian movement created the story of the body-snatching to offset the Christian claim that the tomb was empty. Christians countered by creating their own story of a Jewish/Roman cover-up, which eventually made its way into the Gospel.

Wright points out that Bultmann’s theory requires Christianity to begin without any belief (even a mistaken one) in Jesus’ bodily resurrection — which is exceedingly improbable.

Further, the theory requires the early Christians to misapply Jewish resurrection language when speaking of Jesus’ “spiritual” presence. Given what we know of ancient Jewish belief, this is unlikely, but it is made doubly so by the fact that other early Christians would have to mistake the metaphor for an actual event — and then, for some reason, invent stories to back it up.

These invented stories would then have to circulate so widely that the anti-Christian movement would be forced to invent its own, to combat them. Then all of the stories would have to find their way into Matthew’s Gospel — in a remarkably short period of time.

“Remarkable” is the right word. This explanation has less historical support and requires more faith than the one given in Matthew — that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Shayne Looper is the pastor at the Lockwood Community Church in Michigan. He can be reached at salooper@dmcibb.net.